I ride a compact 50/34 with a 11-34 cassette. With the wider range cassette, 97% of the time I'm in the 50 tooth up front. The wider spacing works for me since it's reduced the amount of down and up-shifting. But, this also means my cadence varies more, like within 10 rpm's versus 5 rpm's. if you prefer closer gaps and tight shifting, then the compact may no be an upgrade.

Really this depends on the terrain you ride in and your style of riding if this is a good swap or not.

$560 would be a good investment on N+1, could be a good reason for the next bike. Or at least go out and test ride some bikes in the gearing you're thinking of.

Keep it!! I would kill to find a nice triple setup on a newer road bike.. as a result of this trend to compact doubles I always have to mess with cassettes, rear ders, etc in order to get a little better climbing ability. And it's still hard to overcome the disadvantage of a 34T small chainring.

I never had problems with triples, especially 105 or Ultegra.. I suspect this was all about cost cutting on the part of the manufacturers, with some marketing spin to make it sound like a great idea, lol..

I also belong to the triples for mountain bikes and doubles for road bikes camp, although I have also enjoyed the third-step (49-46-43/13-16-19-23-26) and half-step-plus-granny (48-45-34/13-15-17-19-21-23) road setups I have used in the past.

It depends on how much range you need, how high a top gear and how low a bottom gear. I simplify the problem greatly by topping out in the mid-90s (93 to 98 gear-inches on the four road bikes) and bottoming in the low-mid 40s (43 or 44, although the Sieger does have a hardware-constrained higher-than-ideal low of 47 inches). The road bikes each get a 2x6, with either half-step or 1.5-step, but the mountain bike does have a 3x8 1.5-step-plus-granny (48-40-24/12-13-15-17-19-22-25-28).

I saw the 14-speed Rohloff IGH mentioned, but the ratio step is a bit larger than my preferred 6 or 7 percent.